JAMES PARKER

A smoker’s tale

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:04:49 GMT

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

SILVER HAZE: The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here — as is Henderson the Rain King.

The Butt | By Will Self | Bloomsbury | 368 pages | $26

Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books. So dashing and weird and telegenic a figure did he cut back in the early ’90s, when The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun were coming out, that it seems he should have broken up by now, like a band, or passed onto some other, fresher phase of notoriety, like a housemate from The Surreal Life. Still, a writer writes, always (as Billy Crystal tells his students in Throw Momma from the Train), and here we are with his seventh novel, The Butt, the surprisingness of which is compounded by the fact that it’s very good indeed.

Tom Brodzinski, vacationing en famille in a Third World tourist trap, flicks his cigarette end off the hotel balcony; it lands with a flesh-creasing hiss upon the scalp of an elderly fellow guest, whereupon Tom is pitched into a netherworld of liability and tribal justice, attorneys and witch doctors. As part of the reparation proceedings, a local medicine man makes a ritual incision in Tom’s thigh: “The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips.”

Devout viewers of reality TV will of course be reminded of the Discovery Channel’s 2006 series Going Tribal and the famous “penis inversion” undergone by its host, Bruce Parry, among the Kombai tribesmen of West Papua. “The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his [Tom’s] shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle.” The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here. Add a dollop of Kafka’s The Trial, one small Joseph Conrad (peeled and sliced), half a Graham Greene, a squirt or two of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and simmer it all over a low Flann O’Brien. . . . Mmm, tasty!

Blood sucks

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:45:20 GMT

HBO does the ‘Southern Vampire’
With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine.

BLEACHED: As Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood’s telepathic waitress heroine, Anna Paquin seems a little lost.

With regard to this whole nouveau vampire thing, this revitalized appreciation for the undead, I should declare myself at the outset a more or less complete philistine. There’s very little goth in my veins; I have no feel for the crypt or the curlicue. The vampire, as a figure, attracts me only in a remote and æstheticized sort of a way — like an Impressionist, say, or a Bolshevik. So I haven’t read Anne Rice, and I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer, and I haven’t read Charlaine Harris, on whose “Southern Vampire” series HBO’s new drama True Blood is based. I have seen Harris’s picture, however, and she looks like a lovely, jolly, un-vampiric woman.

Were you a fan of Six Feet Under? Because True Blood (which premieres this Sunday, September 7, at 9 pm) is written by Alan (American Beauty) Ball, who also directs a few of the episodes. The opening credits are great — bottleneck-blues thump over fretted images of snakehandlers, swamp shacks, midnight roads, trembling Pentecostalists, etc. And the premise is . . . interesting: after thousands of years of stakes-through-the-heart and garlic bulbs shaken in their faces like maracas, the vampires are comin’ out. They want respect, they want to lead normal lives. Above a liquor-store counter, a TV is making shrunken chat-show noises — Bill Maher is on screen, archly quizzing one of the brides of Nosferatu. “We’re citizens,” she insists, “We pay taxes, we deserve equal rights.” What? Rights for vampires? Surely this is liberalism run mad! “But doesn’t your race have a rather sordid history?” asks Bill, voicing the obvious concern. “Well, now that Japanese have perfected synthetic blood. . . . ” Ah, the Japanese. Bless their industrious hearts.

So the vampires are like . . . outsiders. Marginalized. Discriminated against. “GOD HATES FANGS,” proclaims a roadside sign. Ho-ho. And now they’re entering society. People are having sex with them, and not just that droopy vampire sex you see in the movies.

In recent years, the erotics of vampirehood have tended to function as a corrective to the hegemony of porn, privileging pallor, languor, swooning, and submission over the sunbed glow and the hard-on that never sets. The vampires of True Blood are raunchier than that. Nastier, if you will. Grrrr.

The truth is up there

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:58:32 GMT

Clouds, sun dogs, and the dream of an atmospheric education . . . How one former TV reporter brought his sky gospel to the people
The sky’s on the move again, he can feel it.

Clouds, "Motion of the Ocean" (from We Are Above You) (mp3)

Slideshow: Cloud life: Cameraphone cloud pics from around town. By k bonami.

The sky’s on the move again, he can feel it. Mute, significant dramas of cloud in the late summer — huge manifestations, each one different, churned by its own bucking thermals and pockets of glare.

“This has just been the lengthiest skein of towering cumulus clouds,” says Jack. “In 30 years of almost excessive sky watching, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

And as to his mission, his vocation, there have been the usual celestial hints. Drifting serendipities. Prods of light, directing him.

“That’s the way it’s always worked with this thing,” he says. “Sometimes it’s like going up a glass mountain in Vaseline shoes. But there are connections, things falling into place, constantly. And then you have to follow them.”

There’s the organization — For Spacious Skies, a culturally mobile philosophical/meteorological think tank dedicated to the promotion of “sky awareness” — and then there’s the man: Jack Borden. And at this point, three decades into the story, there’s really no telling them apart. Who hasn’t Jack talked to, lectured, belabored, over the years, in his stop-start jazzy/professional cadences? Who hasn’t he laid his sky trip on? Educators, aviators, politicians, weathermen, mental-health professionals, prison administrators, conservationists; TV, radio, print . . . he’s crisscrossed the continent, pitching for the heavens, puffing his cloud patter. And the message? It’s really very simple.

“There are benefits — moral and aesthetic and educational benefits — to be derived from just being aware of what’s going on over your head.” Borden’s slogan Number One: “No kid who appreciates the beauty of the sky is ever going to mug a Cumberland Farms cashier!”

Jack, at 80, is avid, dogmatic, wry, ebullient, tireless. At 50, he must have been formidable; at 30, a maniac. His conversation is fast-moving and tangential. He has crystalline recall. We pass six overheated and talk-filled hours as interviewer and subject, in the course of which I fortify myself with (tallying it all up) a PowerBar, a mug of tea, a bottle of water, a swordfish steak, a Caesar salad, a Heineken, and two French rolls. Jack’s total intake: a cup of coffee and a root beer.

Beijing sting

JAMES PARKER — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:48:00 GMT

Exposed: A top-secret government memorandum, obtained this past week by the Phoenix, gives the games away
Greetings, faithful steward of information!

FROM General Administration of Press and Publication, Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China

TO All organs of the National Press

8.8.08

Greetings, faithful steward of information!

On this auspicious day, this day of mighty augury, replete with the promise of the lucky number “8,” we commence the noble proceedings that will most certainly not be remembered by all the world as the Clusterfuck Olympics, Worst Idea Ever, Historic Environmental/Sporting Disaster, etc.

Beijing 2008: Special Issue: China, Tibet, and the Olympics

Beijing is ready! The air sparkles with asbestos crystals, mighty industrial hoses are sluicing the public toilets, and in the Olympic Village, the apartment buildings that fell down last night have already been rebuilt. All dissent has now been neutralized! Four million pollution-producing vehicles have been impounded. The embargo against hair-dryer use continues to be energetically enforced. And the People’s Internet remains secure — the glorious firewall whose protective coils encircle our Republic like those of the celestial dragon Tianlong will never be breached, never!

What, you ask, can you do? What is your part in this magnificent popular effort? Read this handout carefully, comrade. Read it again, even more carefully. As the “eyes of the world” turn upon China, you have an important role to play! “No news is good news,” says the American. He is incorrect. All news is good news, and the Republic looks to you, as a state-approved news propagator, to draw the attention of our international guests to the famous “silver lining.”

No doubt by now it has not rained upon the opening ceremonies, drowning the occasion in sulphurous yellow-dog precipitation that raises a strange foam upon the scalp. Thanks to the preventive actions of our farseeing Weather Modification Program, whose stirring and masculine arsenal of silver-iodide rockets already will have been fired into the looming clouds to “empty” them, such an eventuality will assuredly have been avoided!

But if not, it will be your job as a journalist/news outlet to emphasize the distinctively Chinese character of the ensuing downpour — its plum-scented richness and softness, and its hygienic properties! The choreographed appearance of 80,000 government-issue umbrellas will also be splendid beyond imagining. All press officers have been issued with a copy of “Rain,” by our great seventh-century poet To Fu: “Bright drops descend/Lacing with jewels my lonely pomegranate bush./ Generous heavens,/ Send this old man a bride, will you? Damn!” For your convenience, the poem has been translated into 47 languages.

Visions from Lilliput

JAMES PARKER — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:46:43 GMT

The rise of the minisode
In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape.

In a sense, every successful portmanteau word represents a narrow escape. The adventurous designers of the combination spoon/fork, for example, could easily have called their invention a foon. And the gaffes available to Sony Pictures Television, when it decided last year to produce five-minute Web-friendly versions of a heap of popular shows, were without limit: tinyvision, teewee, the dinkyNet. . . But sound æsthetics prevailed, and just as the fork with spikes was named a spork, the condensed TV episode enters the language in righteousness as a minisode.

One could argue, however boringly, that in the phenomenon of the minisode — which proclaims its retention of the “full narrative arc” of its original, even as it scrunches that into near-nonsense — our culture is presenting yet another symptom of intellectual decline, creeping ADD, capitalist brain acceleration, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes with the Minisode Network on YouTube (it also runs on MySpace, Crackle, Joost, AOL Video, and Verizon Wireless) were enough to convince me otherwise: the minisode is its own thing, a kind of minimal, calligraphic rendition of the original story, rather illuminating in the spareness of its strokes. Did I say strokes? An episode of Diff’rent Strokes came in at just over four minutes and still seemed purgatorially long. Most of the old-school comedy dramas, in fact, are mercilessly deconstructed by the minisode, each one boiled down to its rag of a plot and its three haggard jokes. Larry Hagman frowns and jiggles the ice in his drink in I Dream of Jeannie; Edna Garrett mugs maternally through The Facts of Life; almost nothing else seems to be happening. The form rejects filler, but what if filler is all there is?

The kind of TV that adapts itself most readily to the minisode, in fact, is resilient mutant super-trash TV — daytime talk shows, soaps. Ricki Lake was more or less made to be minisoded: from premise (“The bitch gave me chlamydia!”) to moral (“This is not an easy show to sum up, but I think we can all agree that the children are of the utmost importance. . . . ”) all in 4:57 or less. A minisode of The Young and the Restless in which Nicki and Victor exchanged vows while Ashley recorded a tearful video message for Abby seemed to me an admirable display of dramatic economy. The plot moved smartly. The characters were vivid and alive. The posters in the YouTube comments box certainly seemed to dig it: “I hate his new wh*re of a wife she a gold digger why can’t he see that?” wondered MoonGoddessFox. Equally immune to abbreviation is the obstacular ugliness and frenzy of The Three Stooges: the minisode, in fact, might be the format that finally permits me to get to grips with this very unsettling body of work.

Me and my tattoos

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:25:38 GMT

One Man’s Inky Voyage Toward Meaning
I know that most people get their first tattoo when they’re drunk, or infatuated, or when there’s a race war on their cellblock and they have to quickly join a gang — but not me.

I know that most people get their first tattoo when they’re drunk, or infatuated, or when there’s a race war on their cellblock and they have to quickly join a gang — but not me. My first session with Donny (who does all my work)? He never even took out his tattoo gun! We just talked and looked at pictures — it actually got pretty deep. Donny’s a libertarian Odinist with degrees in unicycling and hand-to-hand combat, and he had a lot of empathy for my life situation. I told him how I’d recently received a lower-than-expected tax refund, plus I was fighting off a bad cold, and I felt like I really needed to get out of this slump that I was in: I wanted something on my forearm that would symbolize the power of rebirth. Donny suggested a snow leopard in clown makeup with a yin/yang sign in its mouth. “But don’t get it now,” he said. “Sleep on it.” So I did. And that night I dreamed of . . . a snow leopard in clown makeup with a yin/yang sign in its mouth. When I got to Donny’s shop the next morning, I didn’t have to say a word.

So you see, for me, every tattoo tells a story . . .

UPPER BACK: KUNDUN. I got this right after I saw the film Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese, all about the young Dalai Lama and his flight from Tibet. I went straight over to Donny’s shop and told him to write the word across my shoulders in some kind of cool Asiatic script. The idea of this person who is so special that all the world should listen to his message of peace and spirituality, but instead he gets chased out of his palace — I really related to that as I’d just had my six-month review at work (not good).

MIDDLE BACK: The Eye of Horus. This is a big piece. Wikipedia says that the Eye of Horus is “an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection and royal power from deities, in this case from Horus or Ra.” What a great name for a deity — Ra! I got this when I thought I’d left my iPod on the T and I was really bumming. A couple of days after Donny put the finishing touches on the Eye, guess what? I found my iPod at the bottom of my bag. I was pretty freaked out.

Our superheroes, ourselves

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:29 GMT

What the current crop of comic-book action movies tells us about America's identity crisis
Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer?

Shrink wrapped: Gamma rays got you down? The doctor will see you now. By Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg

Is there a breed of person more tenderly optimistic, more winsomely hopeful for the best, more loyal to the possibility of good, than the American summer moviegoer? To put it another way, has there ever been a bigger sucker? Year after year, he stands in line and hands over his money, to receive, year after year, the same treatment: i.e., Hollywood shivering in icy gratification as it pisses on him from a great height. It’s become one of nature’s biorhythms, like the return of the swallows to Capistrano: the dog days come around, the asphalt softens in the heat, and the megaplexes begin to bloat and boom with big-budget idiocy.

And idiocy, being always the sequel to some other idiocy, is never original. You’ve seen it all before! National Treasure 14: Hell’s Gate. . . The Matrix Deionized. . . Son of Son of Fool’s Gold. . . No Way Can You Die This Fucking Hard. . . The product is poor, the contempt is palpable. If you bought it once, goes the thinking, you’ll buy it again. In fact you’ll never stop buying it — why should you?

This summer, however, things are a little different. True, we’re getting the usual rash of run-ons and sequelae — Hellboy II (opens this weekend), a second attempt at the Hulk (from a few weeks back), our seventh installment of Batman (next weekend) — but when you add Iron Man and Hancock (which have earned $312 million and $112 million so far, respectively) to the roster, a more interesting picture begins to emerge. There’s a certain thematic density to these nearly simultaneous releases. We seem . . . preoccupied. Indeed, we may be said to be obsessed. A sensitive interplanetary visitor, alighting at AMC Boston Common and watching a few of these movies back-to-back, might conclude that we are in the middle of a national nervous breakdown.

The lean green schizophrenia machine
Just take a look at the protagonists: Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a repentant billionaire arms dealer; Hellboy is a demon outgrowing his infernal beginnings; Bruce Banner is a cool-headed scientist incorporating a maddened green monster (that would be the Hulk); Hancock is a celestial being descending gnostically through bum-like levels of mortality and despair; and Batman . . . Batman broods on the turrets of Gotham, ears pricked, phobias squashed, dispensing terror to the bad guys. Common to all these movies is a CGI-blowout of an ending, in which the hero faces down his fear, his temptation, his vengefulness, his will-to-power, his not-self. Good Hulk battles Bad Hulk; Nice Iron Man battles Nasty Iron Man; red-and-blue Spiderman battles all-black Spiderman; Hellboy, who has been assiduously sanding down the stumps of his demon horns (see the hell sparks fly!), sprouts a whole new pair . . . and on and on.

Black Gold digs the crude

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:20:48 GMT

Oiled up
If the poet John Milton were with us today and casting about for a theme epic enough to engage his imagination, I am confident that he would settle on oil .

ACTUALITY: “Don’t put your finger nowhere you wouldn’t put your pecker!” cautions one driller.

If the poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, were with us today and casting about for a theme epic enough to engage his Milky Way–sized imagination, I am confident that he would settle on oil. Its origins among the dinosaurs and its million-year maturation; its eruption into worldly affairs; its life-giving, death-dealing power; its depletion and final exhaustion, and the shuddering of empires that would thereupon ensue . . . These things he would show forth in majestic verse, of the kind that tattoos itself upon the scrolls of immortality.

Or maybe he’d just pour himself a cold one and watch truTV’s Black Gold, which premieres this Wednesday at 10 pm. Black Gold is brought to us by the producers of Discovery Channel’s magnificent Deadliest Catch, and their MO is, it’s clear, “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Instead of three fishing boats scouring the Barents Sea for piscine booty, we have three drilling platforms thirstily breaking the West Texas crust in a race for oil. The hierarchy of the platform is near-identical to that of the fishing vessel, and the risks are similar: the wise old driller runs the rig, the roughnecks work it, and the “worms” or rookies get cursed at and hit in the head by whirling chains. “What in the bald-headed hell is going on out there?!” asks driller Wayne in Episode 2 upon noticing that the Texan flag is flying upside-down over his rig. “That’s a disgrace to the oilfield!” And as in Deadliest Catch, where empty nets and crab cages meant empty pockets, the brute economics of the situation are irrefutable: each rig costs $45,000 a day to run, so if the black gold is not punctually struck . . . “I love to gamble,” says one jolly Texan mogul/speculator, “and I can’t think of a better way to gamble than oil and gas!”

The roughnecks are husky gun lovers and barfighters, young gods of manual labor, but the drillers, in particular, are fascinating. Hollow-cheeked Gerald, missing a toe and a thumb, runs the ancient Longhorn rig with salty imprecations. “Don’t put your finger nowhere you wouldn’t put your pecker!” he cautions his crew. When a couple of improperly fastened lengths of pipe tumble out of their harnesses, Gerald observes that an accident like that can “kill everybody big enough to die.”

Agent Zimmerman

JAMES PARKER — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:11:49 GMT

Bob Dylan? A CIA spy? Wait . . . now it all makes sense. (Or as much sense as his lyrics make, anyway.)
I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the CIA.

The unnamable: Todd Haynes’s not-Dylan movie. By Jon Garelick

He's here: Todd Haynes talks about his Dylan movie. By Rob Nelson

Covering Dylan: From Newport to I'm Not There. By Charles Taylor

Agent Zimmerman: Bob Dylan? A CIA spy? Wait . . . now it all makes sense. (Or as much sense as his lyrics make, anyway.) By James Parker

I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the CIA. The bar was desolate but warm: outside was a Chicago winter like a bear roaming the streets. I’d come to town to interview a garbage man/mobster, and it had not gone well. In fact, I was terrified. So now, with my new buddy beside me, I was drinking like a brain surgeon in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

“The CIA?” I said. “Well, that’s interesting.” I took a swallow of Jameson. “That might even be, you know, sensational.”

His large eyes, glossy with the effects of the four Long Island Iced Teas I had watched him consume, searched mine. It was a long search, to the point where I wondered if perhaps he had simply fallen asleep with his eyes open, like certain gifted tribesmen of the Amazonian basin.

“Your unreflective skepticism,” he said at last, with the ponderous dignity of the totally tanked, “is a tribute to the most daring masquerade of our times.”

“You mean — ,” I began, but was silenced by the raising of a pink, ringed hand.

“Bob Dylan was a spy,” he announced. “A very great spy. And I was his spymaster!” Now he was glaring at me in a kind of rude nostalgic triumph.

The bartender, who’d been stacking glasses, sighed heavily. Like it or not, this story was going to get told.

“Please,” I said. “Go on.”

“How can I convey,” said the man in the bar, relaxing now, “to one as cherubically unlined as yourself, the great anxiety of the 1950s?” The creases in his jacket exhaled a complex, blossomy booze-and-cologne aroma — comforting, in its way. “Above us was the white crack of infinity. The Bomb. Annihilation! But beneath us the ground was shifting, too. Beatniks, Communists, sodomites.”

“Sodomites?”